1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a personal authentication method using a portable terminal such as a mobile telephone and, more particularly, to an admission authentication method and system for authenticating the admission to event sites such as concert halls.
2. Description of Related Art
In order to attend events such as concerts, would-be visitors must directly get tickets sold or distributed at event sites or from ticket agencies, or must order tickets to these institutions by telephone or mail.
On the other hand, a system for checking the admission to an event site by use of a portable terminal device without use of physical tickets is disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 11-184935. In the disclosed method, a person who wants to get an airline ticket makes a reservation of the ticket at an airline company from the mobile telephone via a reservation company. If the ticket can be reserved, the information about the reservation is registered with a flight reservation data file and, at the same time, the information is sent to the mobile telephone by which the application for this reservation has been made and stored. At admission checking, a signal is sent from the portable terminal device to a server which stores the reservation information, upon which the server checks the reservation status, thereby permitting the admission of the user of the portable terminal device.
However, the first-mentioned method in which users get physical tickets presents a problem of cumbersome procedures for ticket acquisition. Besides, event managers or promoters must take the cost of ticket printing, sale, and distribution into account. The second-mentioned disclosed technology must execute authentication processing between a portable terminal device and a server at the time of admission checking, thereby presenting problems of having to prepare necessary authentication programs and to execute the authentication processing which requires, at the time of admission checking, comparatively large amounts of computational resources.